Influence doesn’t scale

Influence is not about scale – it’s about focus. Unfortunately, marketers are usually of a mindset that drives them towards ever larger numbers of people, as Seth explains.

One of my clients is obsessed with market reach – how many people can we get to? This ignores what happens when you get to them, and if you mess that up the scale becomes your enemy.

There are plenty of people with big market reach and little influence. Most bloggers and many journalists are examples of this. There are also plenty of people with low reach and lots of influence. Academics and sourcing advisors are examples here.

Understanding influencers is about using a rifle rather than a shotgun to target the key individuals. Scattershot approaches may be more familiar and comforting but they are measures of activity, not effectiveness.

Now the FTC investigates paid advocacy

I wrote last month on the perils of sponsoring conversations on blogs and Twitter. How prescient was I?! The FTC in the US is investigating the use of such tactics as potential deception. Good thing too.

There are two reasons not to engage in this kind of paid advocacy ploy:

1. The lack of authenticity in the advocacy undermines the very point of doing it. It’s only useful if it’s genuine (or if an interest is declared).
2. Users don’t want to receive it. Spam is spam, irrespective of whether it’s delivered by SMS, email, Twitter or blog comments.

The secret to advocacy is quite simple, as Hugh McLeod explains:

Marketing starts with the product, and the product starts with marketing. If your product sucks then no amount of marketing will fix it. If your product is remarkable then people will talk about it anyway. Marketing is only really necessary when your product is like everybody else’s.

Marketing and the influence of Procurement

Lots of issues are raised in this post from the Procurement Blog. (I know, I know – I didn’t know it existed either…)

Firstly, Marketing has to date eluded the grasp of the procurement profession, much to the undisguised angst of the latter. The implication is that marketing can’t (or won’t?) show financial RoI, so there’s no point in procurement getting involved – what’s the point of arguing over the value of intangible benefit?

Secondly, the procurement professional is acutely aware of its own influence over purchase decisions (unlike most vendors, who ignore procurement until the last moment).

Thirdly, the recession has meant that even marketing is now succumbing to procurement’s scrutiny, and that procurement pros have no intention of letting go of their hold. The long term implications for marketing are serious – will an RoI justification have to accompany all major marketing proposals?

I hope so.

Advertising is dead – official

If the advertising industry thinks this is creative then it is surely clinging to the last vestiges of hope.

It also doesn’t do anything for Microsoft’s reputation…

The influence of networking: Freemasonry versus LinkedIn

The Economist has two excellent articles on the emergence of online business networks such as LinkedIn and Xing, and the role they play versus that of traditional business networks like freemasons, Rotary clubs and alumni organisations. The articles are here and here*.

I’ve written quite a lot about the growing influence of LinkedIn, or rather its enablement of the transmission of influence. The Economist helps to put this in context. Indeed Influencer50 has found, in its research projects, that although LinkedIn has increased its role in identifying clusters of influencers, it is a poor substitute for influence in the real world. LinkedIn’s strength, the ability for any mutually agreeable people to connect, is its weakness – there’s little mandated validation of a person’s character and you may not, in fact, know the person you connect to. We don’t use LinkedIn and other networking sites to determine influence.

We talked about this in the book. It’s too easy to fake online connections, or to artificially inflate the number of connections beyond your actual influence. Very few people are genuine connectors, about 3% of people. The rest are name gatherers with little influence. The few super-connectors I know personally don’t use LinkedIn much, as it exposes their network to strangers. They use a Rolodex.

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